The Prison as Laboratory

"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential," reads the Nuremberg Code of 1947, which was drafted in direct response to the sheer barbarity of Nazi-era medical experiments on Jews and other captive groups. "[The] person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion."

Yet in a convenient disassociation from the ethical implications of the Nuremberg Code, the United States became the only nation in the world to officially sanction the use of prisoners in experimental clinical trials. From the '40s through the early '70s, American doctors regularly injected and infected inmates with malaria, typhoid fever, herpes, cancer cells, tuberculosis, ringworm, hepatitis, syphilis and cholera in repeatedly failed attempts to "cure" such diseases. Doctors in prisons pulled out prisoners' fingernails and inflicted flash burns to approximate the results of atomic bomb attacks and even conducted various "mind-control" experiments using isolation techniques and high doses of LSD, courtesy of the CIA.

By 1972, the pharmaceutical industry was doing more than 90 percent of its experimental testing on prisoners. The appeal and the advantages of an always accessible, highly controlled study group were obvious to researchers and trial sponsors alike; and, as researchers liked to point out, inmates themselves were eager to do something good for society, make money, or win favorable treatment or early release. But failures of these research studies often had devastating results on their captive subjects.

In October 2000, nearly 300 former inmates filed suit against the University of Pennsylvania, dermatologist Albert M. Kligman and corporate giants Dow Chemical and Johnson & Johnson for injuries, lingering physical illnesses and psychological trauma suffered as a result of experimental research conducted at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia between 1951 and 1974. The lawsuit, now pending in federal district court, alleges that University of Pennsylvania researchers deliberately exposed prisoners to dangerous and toxic substances without informing them of the attendant risks. The experiments—which formed the focal point of Allen M. Hornblum's 1998 book Acres of Skin—included the application of powerful skin creams, new cosmetics, dioxin and high doses of LSD.

The majority of the plaintiffs are low-income African-American men who were paid $2 to $3 per day for lending their bodies to "science" while incarcerated. The majority of these former prisoners have died, according to Thomas M. Nocella, the attorney representing the plaintiffs; of those still alive, all are in poor health. Now in their fifties and sixties, the men and women suffer from breathing problems, gynecological complications, and all manner of skin rashes and infections. The Holmesburg suit comes on the heels of a $2.4 million settlement awarded in March 2000 to a group of former Washington State prisoners whose testicles had been sliced up and radiated in experiments from 1963 to 1973.

This grossly perverted "era of experimentation" in prisons should be an unpleasant and distant memory. From the late '70s through the early '90s, a variety of state and federal laws, as well as carefully worded university regulations regarding the protection of human subjects, brought rampant prison experimentation to a screeching halt. American Correctional Association policy generally prohibits the use of inmates for medical, pharmaceutical or cosmetic experiments.

But evidence has emerged that prison-based research studies are again being conducted in numerous states—including Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Texas—and that hundreds of clinical trials and experimental therapies may have subjected prisoners to unjustifiable medical risks, in clear violation of existing federal regulations.